“I’m happy to share about how I came across your books, it feels quite serendipitous really. I’d recently lost my father before coming across Reflections for Touching Hearts, My father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and my sister and I were providing home hospice support for him. He’d left us for the long walk home about two weeks after coming home from the hospital. Shortly after, my sister left and I was going through an arduous grieving process (as they tend to be). I’ll never forget thumbing through the books at the “take a book, leave a book” library and coming across RFTH. You know, before this I’d tell you that you’d never believe it – but there’s something about people “leaving us” where you end up in these auspicious situations that make you wonder if they ever left. I’ll never forget – I’m across the road from the ocean, and the sun is shining, but I have so much heaviness and that loneliness that comes with losing someone you love. I open the book to this page: “the sad part of a tragedy is the loss of a beautiful person we were close to – the tragic part of this sadness is if we don’t see that it’s through this loss that we can gain so much closeness with ourselves & others.”
My sister, father and I come from a very small family – it was just us. My dad was quite ill with a myriad of health issues for some time and I was his caretaker over the 15 years or so of his health problems. I’d recently gone through a break up of a long, long relationship a couple of years prior to losing my dad and my greatest fear was having to go through the loss of my dad “alone.” Life can be unexpected sometimes and while the “worst” ended up happening – I found out when he passed, I had such a rally of support from unexpected places – my best friend moved in with me for five months and cooked me breakfast, lunch and dinner every day. We poured over the Reflections books together and it brought us so much light in such a heavy time. Friends came and worked 12 hour days under the hot sun carting out garbage and the things that were too hard for me to look at and see go. My godson (the one who I will be giving a copy of Ogo Pogo to) sent me a care package and a picture frame he’d picked out to to put a photo of myself and my father in – and a fuzzy blanket for when I was feeling sad. And some candies and a hot wheel car because he was 7 – haha. Although I felt “alone” in a romantic sense, I learned that love can be found in so many other places and that I just didn’t have my eyes open to the possibilities!
That particular page was so resonant of what was going on in my life. I love everything about the books and I show them to every friend that comes over. It makes everyone smile so much. I make them bookmark their favourite/most meaningful pages and put a sticky note with their name on them. And I even scanned one page (I can’t quite remember which one) and put it in a picture frame to give to a friend when he was having a hard day.
I am intending to give a couple of copies to my best friend who moved in and helped me navigate such a difficult time – she said that she was going to reach out and try to order a few copies for herself but I’m trying to beat her to the punch. I really appreciate your work and what it meant to me on that day. I strongly believe that artists should be paid fairly & fully for their work, so please charge me full price for the entire collection. If you could ship them, that would be fantastic but there is no rush – whenever is convenient for you.”
Cheyenne Boyko
Brock Tully 